The Spark Behind the Multiverse
On fathers, fiction, and the place where fact and story sit side by side
Readers ask me a version of this question a lot: "Is Brett Poole based on your dad?"
The short answer is no. Brett Poole is not my father. He's an Egyptologist who used to be a paleontologist, for reasons no one — including his own daughter — can get him to explain. He disappeared when Jamie was six months old. He keeps secrets the way other people keep houseplants: quietly, persistently, and with a great deal of guilt he refuses to discuss. None of that is my dad's story.
But the short answer isn't the true answer. The true answer is longer, and it's this: my father is not Brett Poole, but he is, undeniably, the reason there is a multiverse for Brett Poole to disappear inside of.
The Spark Nobody Meant to Light
My dad is a quiet man. He always has been. He's also, by profession and by nature, an inventor — a man who holds patents, who built his own stereo speakers the size of dishwashers, who once spent a small fortune of Sunday mornings glued to Doctor Who and Space: 1999 with a baby he'd more or less forgotten was in the room with him.
I was that baby.
For a baby, I have vague memories of those mornings and a few that are quite sharp: dramatic closeups of the Doctor or his yellow car, and strange alien planets. I could go on, but that's not the point of this blog. Somewhere in me, something was listening. By the time I was four, I was trying to write my first book — about otters, because that's what a four-year-old knows something about. It wasn't good. It didn't need to be. What mattered was that somebody had already handed me the idea that stories were worth chasing, before I even had the vocabulary to say so.
That's the thing about my dad's influence on my work: he never once sat me down and explained it. He just kept doing the things he did — reading, tinkering, inventing, watching the impossible unfold on a television screen — and I kept absorbing it, the way a kid absorbs a language just by being in the room where it's spoken.
Scotland, Ghosts, and Grade Five Math
When I was young, my parents took me to Scotland — castles, battlegrounds, a night in a house that was, by local consensus, haunted (they mostly are, over there). I stood on Iona's shore and felt something I didn't have words for yet. Columba's ghost? He roamed those shores once. Dad was doing his own quiet genealogy work in the background of that trip, chasing down ancestors the way he chased down radio frequencies — patiently, methodically, certain that if he just kept looking, he'd find the signal.
I think that's where I first understood, without being told, that the past isn't really past. It's just somewhere else, waiting to be found if you're willing to go looking.
My dad also could not, for the life of him, help me with my grade five math homework — not because he didn't understand it, but because he understood it too well, on a level that had nothing to do with what a ten-year-old needed. But books? Books he could hand me exactly right. Pirates. Vikings. Time travelers. Detectives. Aliens, always aliens. "I think you'd like this one," he'd say, and hand it over, and he was right every single time.
Building My Own World
My mother wanted me to be a teacher. I understand why — it's a good, stable, respectable thing to want for your kid. I even tried it for a while. But somewhere underneath that plan, another one had already been laid down years earlier, without either of us quite noticing it happen.
I learned to code, the same way my dad had built his career on frequencies and signals. And at night, I wrote books — the kind he'd have handed me himself, if he'd been the one writing them. Pirates. Vikings. Aliens. Time travelers. I kept all of it. I just built a whole world to put them in. Jamie's world.
That world is a multiverse now. And it exists, in the most literal sense, because my dad introduced me to the idea that other worlds — other times, other realities — were worth imagining in the first place. Every timeline in the Jamie Poole Diaries is, in some sense, a lantern hanging off a branch my dad planted in me before I could walk properly.
Where Fact and Fiction Actually Meet
So here's the honest shape of it, for anyone who's ever asked whether Brett Poole is my father:
He isn't. Jamie's relationship with her dad is complicated in ways mine isn't — secrets, disappearance, decades of silence about his own parents. That's not my biography, and I'd never want it read as such, out of respect for my own father, who deserves to be known as himself, not folded into a fictional man he isn't.
But the spark is real. The instinct to chase a story past the edge of what's known. The patience to keep looking for something buried, whether it's an ancestor or an antenna signal or the right ending to a scene. The quiet, undemonstrative way a parent can hand a kid an entire imaginative life without ever once making a speech about it — that's all him. That's not invention. That's memory, filtered through fiction, the way memory usually has to travel if it wants to survive being told out loud.
I don't know that my dad ever set out to build anything except better antennas and a well-organized family tree. But somewhere in the process of doing that — quietly, patiently, without any idea he was doing it — he built the person who'd go on to build an entire multiverse of her own.
That's not biography. But it's true anyway.
Thank you, Dad.
And if this message speaks to you, check out the Jamie Poole Books or the companion tarot deck: The Time Travelers Tarot and take a discount with the code JAMIE10. Like my dad, I invented something new too. It's a world's first in tarot.
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